We could go over the cliff. You would hope not. You would hope that people see what needs to be done. It’s not rocket science. It’s not difficult. It’s not even all that costly. It’s actually about the way you think about the world.Tim Flannery

As delegates gather in Montreal, they should reconsider their whole approach to global warming, say MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER and TED NORDHAUS

Globe & Mail, Monday, November 28, 2005

In January, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that one of his top priorities as chairman of the Group of Eight industrialized countries would be to galvanize the G8’s commitment to action on global warming.Continue reading

LET US BEGIN BY ASSUMING what appears to be true: that the so-called “environmental crisis” is now pretty well established as a fact of our age. The problems of pollution, species extinction, loss of wilderness, loss of farmland, loss of topsoil may still be ignored or scoffed at, but they are not denied. Concern for these problems has acquired a certain standing, a measure of discussability, in the media and in some scientific, academic, and religious institutions.
This is good, of course; obviously, we canÂ¹t hope to solve these problems without an increase of public awareness and concern. But in an age burdened with “publicity,” we have to be aware also that as issues rise into popularity they rise also into the danger of oversimplification. To speak of this danger is especially necessary in confronting the destructiveness of our relationship to nature, which is the result, in the Ãžrst place, of gross oversimplification.Continue reading

A new U.N. report shows a dramatic decline in the many benefits that mankind reaps from the Earth’s forests and oceans. The study by the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is unusual because it examines the benefits of nature as if they were services. The study also outlines what politicians and people can do to reverse the decline in these so-called services.Continue reading

A new report released today by international scientists for the United Nations warns that the world is using up its natural resources too quickly and that approximately two-thirds of the earth’s ecosystems are in danger of being destroyed.

The report said that 15 of the world’s 24 major ecosystems were in decline and that unless something was done to reverse this trend, the situation will get much worse over the next half century.Continue reading